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To everyone who joined these forums at some point, and got discouraged by the negativity and left after a while (or even got literally scared off): I'm sorry.

I wasn't good enough at encouraging people to be kinder, and removing people who refuse to be kind. Encouraging people is hard, and removing people creates conflict, and I hate conflict... so that's why I wasn't better at it.

I was a very, very sensitive teen. The atmosphere of this forum as it is now, if it had existed in 1996, would probably have upset me far more than it would have helped.

I can handle quite a lot of negativity and even abuse now, but that isn't the point. I want to help people. I want to help the people who need it the most, and I want to help people like the 1996 version of me.

I'm still figuring out the best way to do that, but as it is now, these forums are doing more harm than good, and I can't keep running them.

Thank you to the few people who have tried to understand my point of view so far. I really, really appreciate you guys. You are beautiful people.

Everyone else: If after everything I've said so far, you still don't understand my motivations, I think it's unlikely that you will. We're just too different. Maybe someday in the future it might make sense, but until then, there's no point in arguing about it. I don't have the time or the energy for arguing anymore. I will focus my time and energy on people who support me, and those who need help.

-SoulRiser

The forums are mostly read-only and are in a maintenance/testing phase, before being permanently archived. Please use this time to get the contact details of people you'd like to keep in touch with. Send me a message if you'd like to keep in touch with me & Steve.

Please do not make a mirror copy of the forums in their current state - things will still change, and some people have requested to be able to edit or delete some of their personal info.

itt ABC thinks anyone under 18 is as gullible, dumb, internet obsessed and computer illiterate as this. I bet ABC don't have Facebook, they treat it like 4chan, they portray the girl as an overly sensitive internet obsessed teen who feeds trolls all the time. Also, GUESSING a password is not hacking. Someone in the film says the password was her old cat's name, why would you use such a weak password in the first place?

I remember watching this with a bunch of people on /b/ when it came out. Very lulzy to both watch it and read the comments of 4chan users at the same time. I think it is the most over exaggerated garbage I have ever seen. Funny over exaggerated garbage though.

I watched this movie for the first time in the hospital.. I'm sure by now most of you know I tried to kill myself and i was sent to the hospital.

my reaction to the movie was pitiful. I started crying at the suicidey scene. -_-
Pathetic. I know. It was an emotional reaction to something I related to.
Being "cyberbullied" myself. Not the reason i tried to kill myself by the way. And Unlike this cunt I'm not a fucking idiot. I may not like it if there are rumors about me and that shit. but damn, I know who I am, my friends know who I am. What some dumb bitch has to say about me doesn't make a difference to me.

Cyberbullying is a real thing. But the solution is not trying to get people to stop cyberbullying. The solution is to teach people how the fucking block function works.

I strongly believe there should be a mandatory tutorial when your first sign up for something like facebook that shows you have to make yourself as private as fucking possible and shows you how to block people.

Sorry if I'm sounding as if I'm repeating my statement again, but the part which pissed me off most was that it was pretty much advocating for the censorship of the internet. I mean, never mind that the 2010s are pretty much the time when people need to step up to protect internet freedom.

The film makes it look like trolling needs to be fought back, when in reality you should just ignore it (like the news report in the review). Trolls just look for attention, and nothing more. If they're bothering you, just block them.

This movie sucks but so do these thread about it, to be honest.
This movie is a disservice to the problem of cyberbullying, and these threads a disservice to a demographic we should be embracing.

Cyberbullying does actually exist, oftentimes not perpetrated simply by strangers on the internet but your peers from school. Much harder to escape than a simply hitting the block button, just saying... Also, I find it interesting all these so-called internets literate folk don't realize how pitifully easy it is to get around being blocked by someone.

Reading the two threads bumped recently about this movie I've noticed something. Most people seem to be completely forgetting or actively ignoring the whole school-internet crossover aspect of the bullying, a scenario which plays out irl every day for hundreds, if not thousands, of teens. There's a bit of a difference between the trolling most people here are familiar with and basing their assumptions on vs. actively bullied by your peers inside school and out. A constant barrage of shit thrown at you by the people whose opinions on you often carry a great deal of weight. And if you genuinely don't understand that, then I have some news for you that perhaps you're already somewhat aware of; you're the strange one.

Because of this lack of awareness of reality I honestly see a bunch of guilty consciences. Focusing on the type of "cyberbullying" they subconsciously know they're perpetrators of or, at best, an apologist for. Trying to justify it with "well just block them/ignore them/get off the internets" and blaming the victim for being "overemotional" when by most standards these critics lack emotion or any sense of social awareness.

And that's what many in these threads have done, victim blame. I think of the new user who came here after being cyberbullied by their peers at school. A user who has come here because school has seemingly ruined their life inside and out. Who gets no support from their parents or counselors. I imagine that user coming here only to see the same rhetoric spewed by the adults that have failed them, and come to the conclusion that they have no support here either.

I hope that we in this new age of school survival can condemn this rhetoric and make moves to support everyone in need of surviving school.

(04-17-2017 11:42 PM)Night Wrote: Man, why do I have to be reminded of this junk..?

This movie sucks but so do these thread about it, to be honest.
This movie is a disservice to the problem of cyberbullying, and these threads a disservice to a demographic we should be embracing.

Cyberbullying does actually exist, oftentimes not perpetrated simply by strangers on the internet but your peers from school. Much harder to escape than a simply hitting the block button, just saying... Also, I find it interesting all these so-called internets literate folk don't realize how pitifully easy it is to get around being blocked by someone.

Reading the two threads bumped recently about this movie I've noticed something. Most people seem to be completely forgetting or actively ignoring the whole school-internet crossover aspect of the bullying, a scenario which plays out irl every day for hundreds, if not thousands, of teens. There's a bit of a difference between the trolling most people here are familiar with and basing their assumptions on vs. actively bullied by your peers inside school and out. A constant barrage of shit thrown at you by the people whose opinions on you often carry a great deal of weight. And if you genuinely don't understand that, then I have some news for you that perhaps you're already somewhat aware of; you're the strange one.

Because of this lack of awareness of reality I honestly see a bunch of guilty consciences. Focusing on the type of "cyberbullying" they subconsciously know they're perpetrators of or, at best, an apologist for. Trying to justify it with "well just block them/ignore them/get off the internets" and blaming the victim for being "overemotional" when by most standards these critics lack emotion or any sense of social awareness.

And that's what many in these threads have done, victim blame. I think of the new user who came here after being cyberbullied by their peers at school. A user who has come here because school has seemingly ruined their life inside and out. Who gets no support from their parents or counselors. I imagine that user coming here only to see the same rhetoric spewed by the adults that have failed them, and come to the conclusion that they have no support here either.

I hope that we in this new age of school survival can condemn this rhetoric and make moves to support everyone in need of surviving school.

Given your response I'm actually glad I ended up bumping this thread.

First off, the thread is pretty fucking cringy. I'm not even going to claim a moral highground here; the fact that at the time I was a stupid pseudo-evil edgelord didn't help at all. I was a pretty shitty person back then, and my posts during this time reflect that. Moving on.

And yeah, this movie is still 10 tonnes of horse shiet. The characters are all incredibly stereotypical and the movie essentially trivializes the issue through its terrible writing and tropes. It makes cyber bullying look like a joke. I haven't watched the movie in ages so I can't really give a 100% review, but I can give from what I remember. Again, I'm not defending the shit that was spewed in this thread, but I can understand why one might come to the conclusion about cyberbullying because of how badly botched the moral is in the movie. What a fucking disgrace.

Point is, by coddling and sugarcoating the issue, it makes it look like a complete exaggeration. Perhaps we should make a film about how cyberbullying might realistically play out, not this cream puff bullshit.

Though yeah. Personally, I never dealt with cyber bullying, mostly because I never dealt with it, so there's me coming from a terrible position.

I think for a lot of people it's not even a "guilty conscience" but denialism is just the easier route to take. By simply believing "it doesn't happen", we will just ignore the issue. Meanwhile, many teens are dealing with serious shit like this with little to no resources. A thread like this isn't going to help them. Nor is "sucking it up", which is TERRIBLE advice.

Anyhow, a new School Survival should actually attempt to provide resources to counter cyber bullying. The sad thing is that school administrators are woefully incompetent in dealing with the issue. We should help educate more on the issue. Right now awareness is poor, and this movie sums it up.

So, how does this normally play out now? Because I guess I'm not familiar with the current version of this problem. When I was in school, the internet was still a bit of a separate world, and for me usually not populated by very many of the people I knew IRL. People who weren't actually my friends didn't know how to reach me online, and not very many people online were allowed to cross over from there. Peer bullying took place on-site, and internet bullying was done by strangers online whose opinions it never made sense to care about.

How are kids using the internet differently now that changes this? It sounds like they're being a lot looser with information when people who aren't even their friends can pursue and hound them both in and out of school and real life. Is something else affecting this?

Quote:whose opinions on you often carry a great deal of weight

But why? These are just people who happen to go to the same school, right, not people the victim actually knows and cares about? Is this the part that makes me strange if I don't understand it?

Placing the blame entirely on the victim won't do, but neither will acting as if the victim is powerless. It is possible to choose and control how much to care about and let yourself be affected by someone else's opinion. It's also possible to tighten security config to prevent unfamiliar people from contacting you on various platforms. It's also possible to ignore and refuse to react to undesireable online communications entirely, which as far as I know, usually causes the abuse to peter off. Nobody has fun shouting insults and abuse into a void. The entertainment of it exists in the victim's reactions or even escalations.

Unless that's also something new about the issue that I don't know of. And I think that pointing out the ways the victim does have control over the situation is not blaming the victim for the situation, or saying that they have sole responsibility for stopping it. But that's where most of the power exists, at the victim's end. It would be a lot harder to make the bullies themselves stop, than to take measures by yourself to limit how abusive communications reach and affect you.

It's the same as with the rape issue. Yes, obviously people shouldn't rape people, but like, while we're working on that, here are some tips on how to get passed over as a target. Just because there are some things you can do about it doesn't make it your fault when it happens.

All right, so far, how badly am I showing myself to understand this issue as it exists now? How has it changed from this perspective? The way you've described it is a little bit foreign to me.

(04-18-2017 06:57 AM)vonunov Wrote: So, how does this normally play out now? Because I guess I'm not familiar with the current version of this problem. When I was in school, the internet was still a bit of a separate world, and for me usually not populated by very many of the people I knew IRL. People who weren't actually my friends didn't know how to reach me online, and not very many people online were allowed to cross over from there. Peer bullying took place on-site, and internet bullying was done by strangers online whose opinions it never made sense to care about.

How are kids using the internet differently now that changes this? It sounds like they're being a lot looser with information when people who aren't even their friends can pursue and hound them both in and out of school and real life. Is something else affecting this?

Quote:whose opinions on you often carry a great deal of weight

But why? These are just people who happen to go to the same school, right, not people the victim actually knows and cares about? Is this the part that makes me strange if I don't understand it?

Placing the blame entirely on the victim won't do, but neither will acting as if the victim is powerless. It is possible to choose and control how much to care about and let yourself be affected by someone else's opinion. It's also possible to tighten security config to prevent unfamiliar people from contacting you on various platforms. It's also possible to ignore and refuse to react to undesireable online communications entirely, which as far as I know, usually causes the abuse to peter off. Nobody has fun shouting insults and abuse into a void. The entertainment of it exists in the victim's reactions or even escalations.

Unless that's also something new about the issue that I don't know of. And I think that pointing out the ways the victim does have control over the situation is not blaming the victim for the situation, or saying that they have sole responsibility for stopping it. But that's where most of the power exists, at the victim's end. It would be a lot harder to make the bullies themselves stop, than to take measures by yourself to limit how abusive communications reach and affect you.

It's the same as with the rape issue. Yes, obviously people shouldn't rape people, but like, while we're working on that, here are some tips on how to get passed over as a target. Just because there are some things you can do about it doesn't make it your fault when it happens.

All right, so far, how badly am I showing myself to understand this issue as it exists now? How has it changed from this perspective? The way you've described it is a little bit foreign to me.

Vonunov your age is showing a bit but I can't blame you because again, I didn't really use social media back in my school days either (2011-15). I didn't have a Facebook/IG until 2014 and even then I didn't use it much. I never had Twitter or any other of those boogaloos, so honestly I can't really say I'm familiar with the issue.

I believe that Night's point is that the way the internet is used these days has changed a lot; I'm not sure when you went to school but nowadays there's stuff like Instagram, Snapchat, Vine, etc which are widely used and information spreads, fast. Basically, communicating this kind of shit is much, much easier than it used to be.

Combine the fact with the traditional school hierarchy and you've got a toxic recipe for disaster. I think I've written about this before 3 years ago, but generally a popular person can trash a less popular person or a rival pretty quickly on social media and garner a reaction. Of course in school you've also got the herd mentality. Don't forget that way goes online, generally stays online, and it's pretty much semi-permanent.

Another problem is that the school may be incompetent in the situation, whether in malice or by simple miscommunication. School officials may be older, so again, like you and I, just aren't very familiar with the issue at hand. Also, some schools may try to sweep this under the rug as to not tarnish students' reputation in a bullying scandal, or the school's reputation, which can be damaged by news reporting on a potential bullying scandal (especially if it ends in bodily harm, injury, or even the death of a student).

I do agree with what you've said though; telling the victim what they can do isn't blaming the victim per se. Rather, I think a lot of us get frustrated that these simple things could easily fix an issue.

But I think we forget that in the heat of the moment, it can be very difficult to make an actual decision, not to mention the serious attacks on psyche and self-esteem that come with it as well that can cloud judgment.

I'm not really taking a side here. Just providing insight.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that doxing is a thing these days as well, so you've got that issue.